Statues by Michel Serres

Author:Michel Serres
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Second Book of Foundations
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Quattrocento

THE HAMMER Homo Faber

THE HAMMER

Homo Faber

With a hammer in the hand, Phidias, Michelangelo, Houdon, Rodin sculpted; Polyeuctus along with Nearchus and every other iconoclast broke the statues of the idols into tiny pieces, hammer in hand. Nietzsche wanted to philosophize by hammer blows.1

Nothing is more difficult to succeed in than the hypocritical enterprise of destroying. Mosander, according to Symeon Metaphrastes, before Corneille, recounted that Polyeuctus had taken the edict of the emperor Decius condemning the Christians and tore it into bits in order to throw them to the winds; on the same day of wrath, the Armenian prince snatched the idols away from the people who were carrying them to adore them, smashed them against the ground and trampled their pieces, stunning the crowd just as in the tragedy.2 His father-in-law Felix had him beaten in the face by his torturers and ordered that his head be cut off. The limbs of the martyr were then going to rejoin the fragments of the statues and the pieces of the page. For the impiety concerned things and texts. Without any other baptism than that of blood, Saint Polyeuctus then entered into the glory that God had promised the victims: a crowd of pious Christians, during the era that was beginning, will kneel before his effigy. The statue has returned. The iconoclast works in the same direction as the iconolater and much better than this latter, hypocritically. This word means: below critique or upstream from decision, before debate.

The gods acquired their divinity from the violence that opposes the gods against each other. What statues did Polyeuctus and Nearchus break or overturn? That of Dionysus dismembered? That of Orpheus losing his head? Or of Hephaestus chased from Olympus, broken from his fall from the sky, limping badly? Or of Athena Parthenos, a piece of her father’s thigh? An image of Osiris scattered to the four corners of the horizon? What god of paganism, of the polytheistic page, is not already reduced, on its pedestal, to a fragment? In other words, by destroying the idols, the holy martyr entered backwards into the process of their construction and by advancing into the history of saintliness did likewise. The pieces of the gods, broken, become deified.

Scattered over four different places in Europe—Stuttgart, Milan, Paris, Lugarno—the holy story of Stephen, the first deacon, painted by Carpaccio, represents him speaking to the learned, commenting on texts, entering into the diaconate under the benediction of Saint Peter, perched on the pedestal of a statue he just destroyed and haranguing the people with stiff necks in the center of a square, in Jerusalem lastly lying under the flurry of stones held in the hand or flung by the executioners. You can reverse the order of the series at your leisure, as though the lives of the saints were composed of pieces that are combinable and readable in any direction. Likewise, the statue of Saint Polyeuctus substitutes for that of Athena or Dionysus, and the process will begin again when new iconoclasts, hating saintliness, arise.

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